The present invention relates to power sources, such as solar panel arrays, and in particular, to power harvesting techniques for such power sources.
It is common for solar panels (102, 103, 104, 105) to be connected in a serial string such as shown in FIG. 1. The two ends of the string are usually connected to a termination device such as an inverter (101). This configuration is simple to install but does not allow individual panel measurement or control.
To provide measurement, and often control, two known implementations are shown in FIG. 2(a) and (b). Here individual solar panels are connected with both power wires to separate devices (206, 216), and those devices are connected back to the termination device (201, 211). These architectures require both connections to be routed to them for each panel and do not easily lend themselves to installing a device per group rather than per panel.